The Grind

It’s been over a week since I’ve posted, which is pretty uncharacteristic of me, judging by my previous posting history. Well, I’ve been caught up in the “grind”. Basically, that’s what I’m calling the Production stage of my current game that I’m developing. Since I usually like to give some perspective of what I’m doing in respect to a more general picture, I thought it was a great time to discuss the Game Development Cycle.

Before diving into what the game development (aka “gamedev”) cycle is, I’d like to step back for a bit, to describe game development in terms of overall thought processes.

Creativity

An idea for a game starts with that creative spark. It’s difficult to define, but when you are exposed to something new, or you dig up some thoughts or memories, something in your mind just flips a switch. Whereas some people form an idea for a short story, novel, play, sketch, painting, song, or movie, others come up with an idea for a game (Games as a creative work is a topic that deserves its own article, so it’s out of scope for this one). You can tell that I haven’t studied psychology at all, because I’m pretty sure there is terminology and explanations for exactly what I just described; something like neurons, or firing neurotransmitters across synapses, etc. <shrug>.

Anyway, some creative ideas are good, some are great, some are mediocre, and others are just plain terrible. Either way, to bring a video game from idea to reality is quite the challenge, especially since some of those ideas might be so off-the-wall or so overly imaginative, that they may go beyond the scope of what’s possible with current technology.

Software Development

Video games are software. That’s the bottom line, and the basis for the entire development process. Without electricity and some sort of computer hardware, video games are vaporware. With that in mind, it makes sense that you can apply general software development processes and principles to making video games. Right? Well, yes and no. The challenge with video games is that you are creating an artistic work. So for game development, you really need to incorporate a combination of software processes and creative, artistic processes to have any chance of realizing the vision of your game.

The Game Development Cycle

The game development cycle is the process of making a game from start to finish. I’ll give a brief description of each stage of the cycle, but I don’t want to go into too much detail. Instead, I’d like to describe them in terms of the feelings and emotions that a developer might have. So here’s the list as a snapshot, followed by more detail about each stage.

Game Concept

Game Prototype

Art Concept

Preproduction

Production

Alpha

Beta

Final

Release

GAME CONCEPT

Ah, this is the most fantastic and exciting part of the development process. After you get an idea for a game, you start coming up with all sorts of ideas that spawn from that one idea that would make the game more interesting. You conceptualize your game by trying to uncover every possible detail that you have that sounds like it would make the game great.

And of course, instead of keeping all of those ideas in your head, you had better document them somewhere. Speak it into a voice recorder, draw it on a white board, piece of paper, or napkin, talk it over with someone to bounce around more ideas, or more traditionally, write them all down in a game design document. You can further formalize this into a Powerpoint presentation.

GAME PROTOTYPE

In order to test out your ideas, your first attempt at building the software would be a prototype of the end product. This is where you can take all of those great ideas from your game concept (aka “proof of concept”), or at least the high risk features, and put them into a playable form. Some game designers even create prototypes of gameplay features with pen and paper, without any software. But to ultimately get a feel for how your game will play, it’s probably best to write a prototype in software. This is all the experimental stage, where you can figure out if your ideas will work, at a greatly reduced cost of both your time and money. It’s also during this stage that you and/or your team can start evaluating existing technology that you can leverage to make development faster or more streamlined, such as game engines, art/audio authoring packages, and other game development libraries and plugins.

Sometimes, you won’t know when to stop prototyping. When can you determine that the prototype has proven to you and/or your team that it is actually a fun game? That’s for you to decide, and there is no rule for this. It’s typically used to mitigate any sort of game design or technical risks before moving onto the full-blown production, so if you feel that these risks are addressed, you can probably feel safe to move on.

ART CONCEPT

Along with the game prototype, concept art explores what the game will look like. Developing an art style is highly dependent on what sorts of emotions the game is supposed to evoke. The game ideas and prototypes can help identify the art style, as well as the genre that you decide to classify your game. Generating a wide range of concept art will also help to inform the development team about how much work it will take to create a particular style, and also alert the team to any challenges that the style may present to the technology that the team is using. Concept art usually takes the form of sketches, drawings, paintings, storyboards, and even mockup videos or animatics.

This stage is usually done along with the game prototype, but not necessarily in the game prototype, although that is not unheard of. These exploratory exercises stimulate even more ideas to help narrow in on the game’s identity.

PREPRODUCTION

You can argue that all the concept and prototyping stages can be considered Preproduction, but I separated it out here because concept and prototyping are so important on their own. Not only that, rolling into preproduction after finishing the concept/prototyping stages suggests that the full development project has been given the green light to proceed. Sometimes, after finishing concept and prototyping, you might just determine that the game wasn’t all that great after all, and it wouldn’t be worth it to proceed in making it a full blown production. In which case, you just saved a lot of time and money.

But, if you and/or your team are still excited about the game idea, you head into preproduction. You start integrating and experimenting with the existing technology that you evaluated during the prototyping phase, start to stand up core systems in code, write tools to streamline the process of creating artwork and other game content.

At this point in development, you’re still pretty fresh and excited about the game. You start to see core gameplay mechanics getting implemented. Although the results are still pretty rough around the edges, you feel that the prototyping stage has proven itself, because the game is very fun, and with more time, you will run more passes at the gameplay to refine the mechanics and polish them. The systems are fairly disjointed at this point, if they’re even built, and still need integration with each other.

PRODUCTION

Now, all the core systems are in place, the content authoring (art production) pipeline is in place, and it’s time to pump out all that artwork and gameplay. Authoring content for the game can in some ways, be monotonous, in that you are building things, like different types of game units, powerups, characters, items, etc. and sometimes there could be no end in sight. This is why I call this stage “the grind”. This stage takes up the longest development time in the cycle. You simply have to power through authoring the content. Occasionally, you’ll run into bugs that generate friction in the authoring process. And this can greatly hamper development. If, by chance, you do run into a serious issue that threatens the success of the project, or the project’s deadline, you have to re-evaluate continuing with the project. For the most part, you’ve invested so much time and effort into it, you have to eat the cost of however long it will take to solving the bug or issue, work around it, or compromise on the design. In fact, it may even be a game design oversight. As you are working through feature development, perhaps a game design conflicts with another design that no longer makes the game fun. These are the sorts of obstacles that require course correction and really threaten the completion of the game. But it really is important to power through it. If the game isn’t fun, it’s time to try and find other gameplay mechanics that you can substitute to make it fun.

ALPHA

“Alpha” is a software development term that varies across different software industries, and even across different game development studios. The Alpha stage that I am familiar with is when the game can be considered “feature complete”. This means all game features and systems are built, all artwork has been included in the game, but there are still a lot of major bugs to fix, and artwork to polish and improve. Declaring Alpha for your project is actually a cause for celebration. If you’ve made it through the production process, and the game is playable and is still fun, but just needs that extra polish to make things “solid”, you deserve a breath of fresh air. It’s like taking a large breather before going for that final push.

BETA

The “Beta” stage in software development is really the last step before calling it “finished”. This is the time to fix all remaining bugs, tune, tweak and balance gameplay to make it as fun as possible, and add extra polish. This is also a grueling stage of development, since any remaining bugs may have very low reproduction rate, or are very complicated to fix, which can potentially risk breaking the rest of the game, if fixed incorrectly. And polish can sometimes be difficult to introduce at this stage, because some polish tasks can end up taking a long time to implement, or after a little investigation, reveal itself as a complicated feature rather than something that can simply be polished.

Generally, it’s a nerve-wracking stage, but the finish line is in sight. You get very critical about all the work you’ve done, and you want to make sure everything is perfect. So you can actually get pretty stressed out, but you feel that it’s been worth it.

Also, if you haven’t already, this is a great time to prepare any marketing material for your game. The game content is pretty much done, so any sort of marketing screenshots, videos, or descriptions, will better reflect the game at release time. It’s arguable that marketing should actually start way earlier than this, and I actually agree, especially for independent developers. However, any sort of marketing you do before the game is complete will not reflect the final product. Nowadays though, some gamers enjoy watching a game in development, and it helps to create buzz for the game before release.

FINAL

You can finally call your game “done”, but the Final stage is there to do any last minute testing in regard to compliance and integration with third parties, such as online stores.

RELEASE

And the game is finally released! You finally put a new product on the digital store shelves. It’s a time to rest, and also a time to work hard =). Basically, it’s at this time the marketing machine for your many hours/months/years of hard work kicks in to let as many people as possible know about your game. But marketing is out of the scope of this post, as you might imagine.

As you can see, the game development process is very much a journey. Making something out of nothing takes an incredible amount of time, effort, and dedication.

Realities

I’ve left out a lot of details about each stage of the process, mainly because each stage is so jam-packed with its own topics, that it doesn’t make sense to discuss it here. Not only that, the dev cycle that I outlined above is only a generalized look at the gamedev process. Some game developers have even established production frameworks that modify these stages to their own work methodologies. Agile software development comes to mind, and I’ll eventually write something about that too.

Game development is an iterative, creative process. Sometimes the end result doesn’t reflect exactly what’s in your mind’s eye. Sometimes, during the process, you get stimulated by other ideas that come about by something that you created, usually an interesting game mechanic or art style. Other times, you’re blocked by technological limitations or simply by the lack of time required to implement that technology, forcing you to find a way around, out, or through that problem. This incurs unexpected cost, in terms of time and/or money. Existing code and/or artwork has to either be reworked to match the new design, or thrown aside to cut any further losses. It’s no wonder why large game titles nowadays get their release dates delayed, or get extremely buggy launches.

New Trends

A few key things to note. Software is broadly heading towards the idea of “Software as a Service”. Games used to be released, supported for a couple months to patch up any serious bugs, and then development resources are moved on to another project. But now, games are largely supported long after it is initially released. Especially with outlets that allow independent developers to release their games directly to their customers, it’s more important to have the mentality that whatever you release, you have to support and maintain the game for your customers, and keep them engaged with your game and the content that each one offers.

Keep Digging

As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, I’m deep into the Production stage of development. It’s a long haul. I’ve got to grind through it, and every game developer goes through it. But that’s the cost of completion. I have no idea how long it will take me to finish. Originally, I thought I’d be done by the end of August, but now I think mid September, and even then, that’s pretty optimistic. But if you are to ever finish developing a game, you really have to set your goals, and try to set them even higher than you expect yourself to accomplish. Either way, I know I will eventually finish.

So, I guess I just wanted to inform game development newbies of what to expect during a gamedev cycle, and remind experienced developers what they go through to get to the end. That’s game development. It’s our passion, our labor of love. If you really want it, you’ll get it done.